Ant here...
Just went to a really interesting presentation on business models surrounding the concept of 'federation'
Federation in a nutshell: A company or consortium of companies holding a central user database for use in authenticating users accross multiple different services and organisations.
There seems to be an assumption that federation, for the most part, aspires to be based on the Visa card or Mastercard model where a central authorising body coordinates a bunch of transactions between a consumer, a merchant, a consumers bank and a merchants bank. The identity federator(s) aspire to perform this role, presumably for a profit as most businesses aren't terribly altruistic (money makes the world go round, the world go round... especially in the American world). Passport, Liberty Alliance and the like are working to this assumption however, as Carole Coye Benson pointed out, there is a fundamental flaw in the idea of using the Visa/Mastercard model. There's a massive incentive for merchants and consumer's banks to support it - PROFIT and a lot of it!
There's no money in supporting federated identity and so, why subscribe to it? I can't really see organisations spending money on implementing infrastructure for it when there's nothing in it for them except a warm fuzzy that they've made the user experience world a better place. For that matter, why would users spend money on a federated digital identity? (nobody else is going to pay for it are they?).
So, where's that leave us? The BBC is in a particularly strong position to initiate federation but perhaps just jumping on the bandwagon as we are want to do, isn't the answer here. I've no solutions I'm afraid, but I do have a few ideas proposed by Carole which are worth considering. Have a look at the credit bureau model where a third party monitors the financial activity of people. It doesn't require registration persé [sp?]. This system is based on two fundamentals which are particularly good for comparing to the digital identity paradigm, which are history of activity under one identity and the behaviour of that person over that period. Hmmm... food for thought.
Speaking of which, I'm off to dinner so it's goodnight from him, and it's goodnight from me. :-)
Posted by alice at October 11, 2002 12:55 AM